Linux Fundamentals for Engineers
A free course covering the Linux fundamentals that senior engineers are expected to know. Filesystems, processes, systemd, cgroups, and namespaces, the foundation everything else is built on.
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What you'll learn
Curriculum
6 modules · 18 lessonsHow Linux Actually Works
The mental model every engineer should have: how the kernel, userspace, and system calls interact, why 'everything is a file' is more than a slogan, and what actually happens from power-on to login.
Processes & Signals
Processes are the unit of work in Linux. Master their anatomy, how they communicate through signals, and how to read /proc like an X-ray for a running system.
Filesystems & I/O
How Linux organizes storage and streams bytes. Filesystem hierarchy, mounts, file descriptors, pipes, redirection, and what block I/O actually looks like under the hood.
systemd
systemd runs on nearly every production Linux box, including every Kubernetes node. Learn it from first principles: units, services, dependencies, and journalctl.
cgroups & Namespaces
The two kernel features that make containers possible. Understand namespaces, cgroups v1 vs v2, and build a container from scratch using nothing but `unshare` and `cgcreate`.
Linux for Production Debugging
Turn abstract Linux knowledge into the debugging toolkit you need at 3 AM: the USE method, network triage, and the mindset for when something is just… weird.
About the Author
Sharon Sahadevan
AI Infrastructure Engineer
Building production GPU clusters on Kubernetes. H100s, large-scale model serving, and end-to-end ML infrastructure across Azure and AWS.
10+ years designing cloud-native platforms with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, GitOps (Argo CD), Terraform, and MLOps pipelines for LLM deployment.
Author of KubeNatives, a weekly newsletter read by 3,000+ DevOps and ML engineers for production insights on K8s internals, GPU scheduling, and model-serving patterns.